Quotes About Narrative

Any story worth its salt can handle a little shaking up.

Man is the Storytelling Animal, and that in stories are his identity, his meaning, and his lifeblood.

We are the only animals that tell stories to understand the world we live in.

I always thought storytelling was like juggling [...] You keep a lot of different tales in the air, and juggle them up and down, and if you're good you don't drop any.

When we stop believing in the gods we can start believing in their stories.

in autobiography, as in all literature, what actually happened is less important than what the author can manage to persuade his audience to believe

Is history to be considered the property of the participants only?

every story one chooses to tell is a kind of censorship, it prevents the telling of other tales (...)

Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, to rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless.

Happy endings must come at the end of something,' the Walrus pointed out. 'If they happen in the middle of a story, or an adventure, or the like, all they do is cheer things up for a while. 'That'll do,' said Haroun.

There are people who need to impose a shape upon the shapelessness of life. For such people the quest narrative is always attractive. It prevents them from suffering the agony of feeling what's the word. Incoherent.

Literature is disputed territory.

This is our tragedy....our fictions are killing us, but if we didn't have those fictions, maybe that would kill us too.

Man is the storytelling animal, the only creature on earth that told itself stories to understand what kind of creature it was. The story was his birthright, and nobody could take it away.

Impossible stories, stories with No Entry signs on them, change our lives, and our minds, as often as the authorized versions, the stories we are expected to trust, upon which we are asked, or told, to build our judgements, and our lives.

We, for our own part, simply call ourselves we. We are the creature that tells itself stories to understand what sort of creature it is.

Akhir yang bahagia harus terjadi pada akhir sesuatu, jika terjadi di pertengahann cerita atau sebuah petualangan, atau yang semacamnya, yang terjadi hanyalah hiburan sejenak. (Anjing Laut pada Harun, hal. 207)

What is the use of stories that arent even true?

Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, power to rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, are truly powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts.

On this day Bisnaga moves out of the realm of the fantastic into that of the historical, and the great river of its story flows into the ocean of stories which is the history of the world.

The true story is there's no true story any more. There's no true any more that anyone can agree on.

Fictions could be as powerful as histories, revealing the new people to themselves, allowing them to understand their own natures and the natures of those around them, and making them real.

since the past exists only in one's memories and the words which strive vainly to encapsulate them, it is possible to create past events simply by saying they occurred.

And because the stories were held here in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and so become yet other stories; so that unlike a library of books, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was much more than a storeroom of yarns. It was not dead but alive.